SGER, year II: A Web Sociologist's Workbench

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Proposal ID: IIS-0735129 PI: Garcia-Molina, Hector Institution: Stanford University Title: SGER Year 2: A Web Sociologist's Workbench This SGER project is constructing integrated tools that will help social scientists analyze large time series snapshots of World Wide Web content. Such data offer social scientists new means for conducting research into new topics. The exploratory work brings together Stanford's Computer Science department and Political Science faculty at the university. The computing faculty have developed an operational Web archive gathering and storage system. This facility specializes on repeatedly collecting materials from the same Web sites and storing them for subsequent time series analysis. This is considered an important new resource for social sciences research. The central problem for computer science is the large scale of the collected material and the heterogeneity of the content.